Cursor · GitHub · SpaceX · Blue Origin · The Register
How Cursor overtook Git's scalability shortcomings
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◌ Single Source
S3 keeps the source of truth while local NVMe repositories do the latency-sensitive work.
Key facts
- Git creator Linus Torvalds designed his software to work as a content-addressable data store, where all the objects are stored and indexed by the SHA-1 hash of their contents
- With Origin, pushes are uploaded into S3 in a write-ahead log (WAL), capturing all changes as immutable objects
- Now, imagine providing such a service for over 400 million repositories, and you’ll get an idea of the scale at which GitHub operates (or struggles to do)
- When Cursor set out to build its own Git repository, it turned to object storage
Summary
Developers recently burned by GitHub’s system outages should take note that there are other ways to manage Git at scale. A recent post from Cursor principal systems engineer Vicent Martí explains how the SpaceX subsidiary worked through its scaling issues with the notoriously fickle Git distributed version control system. The post explains how Cursor arrived at an architecture for its own Git-based repository service called Origin, which is powered by an internal engine called Continuity. “Agents have fundamentally changed the way they work with software, and in many ways they've made this situation worse.